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Keep the timezone as an offset and not an adjustment

I’ve been working on a side project at home the last few days to snipe hard to find restaurant reservations and came across a weird issue I’ve never experienced before while using the .NET framework.

The API I’m calling to find these opportunities returns a DateTime value in the format “2016-11-21T23:00:00-05:00” which could be read as “November 21st, 2016 11:00pm (EST)”. Now while we’ve read the “-05:00” as the timezone offset which equates to the Eastern Time Zone, it appears the .NET framework in the DateTime.Parse() method, takes that as a hint to adjust the value relative to the local timezone instead to “November 22nd, 2016 4:00am”. Can’t imagine any restaurant that is hard to get is open at 4am in the local time.

While on my laptop (using EST) it was working just fine, deploying this to say… an Azure instance (using UTC) introduces just enough frustration to want to kick puppies and pop a small child’s balloon in passing.

I’ve seen it for years in the intellisense popup in Visual Studio without ever looking at it, and now I know why it’s there. The lifesaving DateTimeOffset type works just like the DateTime type, but when fed the value I needed parsed instead sees the timezone value as an offset (thus the type’s name), not an adjustment hint.

Hopefully you see this before you do anything horrible to a young canine or child. For the record, doing either is mean. Asshole.